J. Keith Vincent

Professor at Boston University, Director of the Masters of Fine Arts in Literary Translation

J. Keith Vincent teaches Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University, where he directs the MFA program in Literary Translation.  As a teacher, he believes strongly in the importance of creating intellectual community and getting students immersed in the work of long books by great writers. He developed BU’s “Big Fat Books” program, now in its eighth year, where students, faculty, and guests come together to read and discuss a different masterpiece of world literature each year, culminating with a symposium in the spring. He co-founded BU’s “Gensex,” a faculty reading group on Gender and Sexuality Studies that has been going strong since 2007. He also leads a biweekly Proust reading group and has taught a course on the world’s first novel, Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, every year since 2016. He and his students recently launched genjipoems.org, an annotated digital repository of all 795 poems in Lady Murasaki’s Tale, in the original Japanese and five very different English translations.  In his spring course on haiku, students learn about the global history of the world’s shortest poetic form and write their own poems each week, critiquing each other’s work anonymously as Japanese haiku poets do. This past spring, he was honored to receive the 2025 Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching.

 In his research and writing, Keith is interested in the relationship of writers’ lives to their writing and especially how their friendships with other writers leave traces in their work.  He has a longstanding interest in the way the aesthetics of haiku has informed the modern Japanese novel via the literary friendship between the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki and the novelist Natsume Sōseki. He is currently at work on a book titled “I, Who Go”: The Young Shiki and the Invention of Haiku and a new translation of Natsume Sōseki’s 1915 novel Michikusa.

Keith is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 2012) and co-editor of two volumes on Sōseki:  Reading Sōseki Now, a special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and Sōseki no ibasho, an edited volume in Japanese. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus Press,  2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the  Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella Devils in Daylight was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2018. His abridged translation of Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (2021) is available as an audiobook on Alexander. Recent articles include “Tragic Fates and the Balm of Beauty: Reading the Tale of Genji in Boston” Shisō, 2024:3; “Purple and White: Sōseki and Shiki’s Homosocial Genji” in the Norton Critical Edition of Dennis Washburn’s translation of The Tale of Genji (2021). He has two essays in press: one on the great Japanese Proust scholar and editor Yoshida Jō and the “École Japonaise” of Proust studies, and another on Proust and the 1001 Nights.

WEBSITES 
Jkeithvincent.com 

HIGHLIGHTS 

https://mahindrahumanities.harvard.edu/event/proust-and-tale-genji - a talk at Harvard on Proust and the Tale of Genji 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Emg3jBe0g - a talk at Chicago on Masaoka Shiki and Marcel Proust 

https://www.popsci.com/technology/genji-poems-online/ - an article about Genji poetry database